jimc@haddock.UUCP (11/27/84)
I am in absolute agreement. I find it so low in taste that it actually sickens me. Jim Campbell INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation Boston
ciaraldi@rochester.UUCP (Mike Ciaraldi) (11/28/84)
For more on "Women's Ware" see occasional issues of Infoworld for the past year. It went through a sequence of articles and letters. Basic sequence was something like this: Articel comes out about "Women's Ware" being introduced. It has a writeup on the owners of the company (all women) and explains their marketing approach. Then points out that they discussed their preliminary marketing plans with a noted feminist (Gloria Steinem, I think) and made some changes. Then a letter came in from someone saying that the reader (don't rememberif it was a man or a woman) found the assertion that one of the uses of this product was to "keep track of the man in your life" (quoted from WW advertsing in the article) was "sexist". A letter then cam in from one of the WW people (director of marketing, or something like that) saying that they agreed the line was sexist, apologized for letting it slip past their proofreading, and promised to not use it any more. I seem to remember that Infoworld finally did a review of some of the packages, and found them only so-so. Contrast this with Creative Computing magazine. In the September issue (I think) Betsy Staples, a long-time editor of CC, wrote a scathing review of WW, basically saying that the programs themselves were no good, didn't work right and weren't useful. She also complained about the documentation, which was written in a "cutesy" style that was both annoying and not effective in communicating the information. Besides this, she blasted the marketing approach of aiming them at women, since this would seem to imply women would settle for rotten programs even if men wouldn't. The latest issue has a letter from a woman who points out that she uses software for all sorts of "women's stuff", e.g. a word processor for sending out letters to her Congressman, a data base manager to track the members of her group, a scheduler to control a day-care center, etc. I consider this the best put-down of all, since it points out that general-purpose software (presumably of interest to anyone) is often much more useful that "targeted" software. And, of course, that the uses women make of computers are not necassarily fundamentally different from men. Since I have not used this software, I won't draw conclusions about its usefulness. I will say that I have read Staples' articles for years and always found her well-informed, thought-provoking, and overall extremely competent. Personally, I thought the idea of the little coathangers was cute, and might even be handy for storing the software on racks at the store. Not being a woman, I wondered whether these programs would still be useful to me. The one that siad it "keeps track of the man in your life" seemed handy and very practical. If someone marketed a program that could keep track of the schedules of two people, both of whom work and attend classes and meetings in the evenings, correlate this with school-age children and their class schedules and day-care, and remembers what babysitters are free when, so that the two adults can actually find time to spend together, I'd buy it! This much artificial intelligence will probably be available about the time we get that automatic German-to-English translation program running. Oh, well... Yours for better software (whoever is using it), Mike Ciaraldi ciaraldi@rochester rochester!ciaraldi